Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works ─ Towards a Theory of Montage

I.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film -- and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century.

The name of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is synonymous with the idea of montage, as exemplified in his silent classics such as The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). In the 1930s his style changed, partly to accommodate the arrival of sound, and his ideas on audio-visual counterpoint developed. Between 1937 and 1940 he elaborated his ideas on montage in a series of essays, most of which remained unpublished until after his death and which are published in English for the first time in this volume. They present the essence of Eisenstein’s thinking on cinema and aesthetics more generally and reveal him as one of the most significant philosophers of art of the twentieth century.

Richard Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Russian Studies at Swansea University, Wales. His numerous books and articles on Russian and Soviet cinema, include Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (1998) and the KINOfile Film Companion to The Battleship Potemkin (2001), both I.B.Tauris. He is Series Editor of Tauris' "KINO: The Russian Cinema Series."

Michael Glenny, who died in Moscow in August 1990, was Britain’s foremost translator of modern Russian literature.